“Your beliefs become your thoughts, Your thoughts become your words, Your words become your actions, Your actions become your habits, Your habits become your values, Your values become your destiny.”
— Mahatma Gandhi
Episode 5- Mindful Moments and The Four Agreements
Thank you for joining me for the first installment of Mindful Moments on Fertile Minds Radio. If you listened to episode 1 or you have worked with me in the past than you already know meditation is a large part of what I do to keep rising towards the best version of myself AND a big part of what I teach to my patients in order to help them have a deeper inner awareness and to achieve high mental clarity. Now, you might be asking yourself what this has to do with fertility?
In my opinion it has everything to do with conceiving and here’s why. I think of meditation as a tool that we can use to help cultivate peace during stressful times. It’s a practice that starts to leak into the rest of our daily life, helping us to feel calm and clear even when we are in the middle of the storm with big decisions to be made. Further more, it’s a tool that we can use to calm the nervous system.
When the nervous system is in fight or flight, it’s broadcasting the message to every single sell in our bodies that the world is not a safe place at the moment and it’s certainly not a good time to procreate. It’s telling our immunity and sex hormones to drop, our blood to clot incase we get cut and shunting our blood flow to our limbs away fro our organs so we can fight or run away. Now most of us have pretty stressful lives and end up in a low grade fight or flight most of our day. The problem is, that the reptilian part of our brain that governs our body's reaction to whether the Nervous System is broadcasting the message “fight or run” vs “it’s time to feed and breed,” doesn’t realize that normal stressors like your boss, a full email inbox, or getting your period when you were sure that you were pregnant this time, isn’t exactly the same as a saber tooth tiger ready to make us their next meal. This is why meditation is a valuable tool now more than ever. It can over-ride this very primal part of our brain that hasn’t yet caught up to the immense stimuli we come into contact with moment to moment. Life has changed at a rapid pace, but our brains are a little slow to catch up- and believe it or not the tool of mediation can help us to hack our own nervous system.
So it can help us to stay calm not only while trying to conceive, but while we are pregnant which is super important because that baby is being bathed in a biochemical reaction you creating in reaction to every thought you have. Think about that for a second. You have a thought, an emotion occurs, neurons in your brain fire changing your biochemistry and bam, your baby absorbs it. This is why I love to teach women to meditate BEFORE they get pregnant.
And lastly, don’t forget the ultimate test for which you will be super glad you have access to this tool called meditation- parenting.
Your kids are going to challenge you to grow on every single level more than you could ever dream. They’re like little mirrors of self realization beaming back at you 24/7 and we all know self awareness or constructive criticism is easier to take when your calm, so why not cultivate this practice now?
At the beginning of the episode I read a quote for Ghandi that I absolutely love. It’s such a great reminder that it’s our minds that ultimately create our destiny.
There is alignment between our inner dialogue and our outer dialogue... between what we’re thinking and what we’re doing; between how we’re feeling and how we’re living life; between what our thoughts are and what we’re saying.
It’s easier to speak from the heart when there’s alignment. It’s easier to not have to wonder, “Is this person really on my side?” There’s passion and excitement in your alignment, there’s freedom and a code that lets you live your human expression from a more universal space. This couldn’t be more important than when you are communicating with your partner and your health care providers during this vulnerable time of trying to conceive.
Today’s meditation is based on a simple code that I find relevant to clarity, daily evolution, & personal transformation: the Four Agreements by the author don Miguel Ruiz. Now, my meditation teacher davidji has encouraged me to get this meditation out there because it’s so useful to so many. It’s so simple, yet so true. I used to have a print out of the four agreements hanging on the wall next to my desk during graduate school, because it seemed that every patient I had that was emotionally suffering could somehow be relieved by simply adopting one or a few of these agreements into their lives.
It's a powerful code to integrate into every word, thought and deed, and mostly likely –these four timeless truths- are already integrated in some way into your Sacred Values. If nothing else, they can act as a powerful opener of your heart; and that will allow you to create more love in your life, feel more love and give more love. If you are asking yourself right now, I don’t know what my sacred values are, I encourage you to check out davidji’s new book Sacred Powers launching this Winter. In it you’ll find powerful exercises to execute after you meditate to help you design your divine code. Once you decide the principles you are committed to living your life by, making decisions big and small get a whole lot easier.
The Four Agreements are:
#1. Be impeccable with your word.
#2. Don’t take anything personally
#3. Don’t make assumptions
#4. Always do your best
For today’s meditation I’m going to give you examples of how don Miguel Ruiz’s concept of the four agreements could pertain to a fertility journey. So Get comfy and let's meditate together.
If you love this meditation and want to own it without this intro so you can do it anytime anyplace simply text 4Agreements to 44222.
Continue the Journey
Your Brain On Meditation- What Happens?
Special Thanks to Musician
This Meditation- text 4Agreements to 44222- if you get a message that say service access denied call T mobile and ask them to "enable short message codes."
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